Cisco Enhances Network OS for Service Providers

Company officials noted that IOS XR has been deployed across more than 50,000 live network routers, and said the enhancements will enable service providers to run their networks at half the total cost of ownership over five years when compared with the current mode of operations. At the same time, they will double network efficiency and performance, and will be able to more easily transition to cloud-scale networking on their current hardware platforms, officials said.
Improvements to the network OS include greater service agility, granular software package and automated upgrades, and the automation convergence with third-party application hosting, including DevOp tools, Chef or Puppet. Large-scale automation for driving operational efficiency is coming through predictable network programming through model-driven APIs like Yang and OpenConfig, as well as enabling IOS XR to more easily adapt to current environments being run in a customer's data center.
There also is improved visibility and control through contextual network insight through data-model-driven access to operational state data, which gives greater visibility than current tools like SNMP, according to Cisco officials. Plus, the company is enabling near real-time programmability through support for telemetry and segment routing traffic engineering.
The additions to Cisco's NCS Series of routers include the NCS 5000 Series, offering 40 to 80 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports and four 100GbE ports, and the NCS 5500 Series, with up to 288 routed 100GbE ports for WAN aggregation. The NCS 1000 Series supports 100/200/250Gb wavelengths over more than 3,000 kilometers using existing fiber.